PhotographySuper Talent Pico-C review
Image © cocos-promotions
The brand of Super Talent was completely unbeknownst to me, until they came up with what must be the smallest thumb drive to date. But to call it a thumb drive doesn't do it much justice, really. Instead it deserves the name thumbprint drive. Yes, it's that small; it's literally as large as my thumbprint. Encased in a a firm chrome plated capsule measuring a measly 31.3 by 12.4 by 3.4 mm, it manages to house op to 8 gigabytes of quite speedily accessible storage. Not blazing fast, but not "let's get some coffee" either. Especially the lighting fast access time of half a millisecond deserves special mention. Read speed is impressive at up to 30 MB/s, write speed is okay at up to 12 MB/s.
I'm a heavy USB stick user (a.k.a. flash drive, pen drive, flash disk, thumb drive). I've seen many and use mine a lot. Very few of them impress me. Most are just flimsy thin plastic. Nice for a throwaway lighter, not for a device I save my files to. My first stick was a 32 megabytes (yes, megabytes) Freecom FM-1 USB stick, and it served me extremely well. It was replaced by a Sandisk Cruzer Titanium, which I continue to use alongside the Pico-C.
Super Talent have named their product Pico (in case you missed it 
), obviously referring to its minute size. The A, B and D models are variations of the same product. The A and D types have a swivel housing, while the B has a slide housing. All are a bit larger than the C version, slightly defeating the purpose of having a pico-sized USB storage device. The Pico-C is flatter than a standard A-type male USB plug. They omitted a part of the rectangular frame that helps to catch the female connector, shaving off about 1 mm of the thickness of the drive. It doens't affect anything though. It is as easily insertable as any other USB stick type device.
The good points
- Extremely small
- No cap. You can't lose what's not there, right?
- Excellent file access time
- Excellent read speed
- No U3. Saves me the hassle of deleting it
The bad
- Advertised as 200x speed (30 MB/s), but this only applies to read access
- It may actually be too small
That last remark turned out to be true, because 6 months after I got it, I lost it. However, I replaced it with a nickel plated one that looks a bit less shiny, and got a LaCie IamaKey for daily use.
© Joris van den Heuvel, Fuzzcraft.com